World Cup Brings Paypal to South Africa.. ?

South African's can now fully enjoy the seamless benefits of the secure online payment service PayPal thanks to  a partnership by a local Bank- First National Bank (FNB) and PayPal International. South Africa in March 2010 became the st African Country to officially join the PayPal secure online payments platform(see official PayPal Blog announcement).On a positive note entry of PayPal to South African subscribers may prove to be the entry point of the service to other African Countries  on the other hand this just demonstrates how Africa is inherently incapacitated perhaps 'by design' in fully utilizing or harnessing the power of E-Commerce and secure online payment systems.

What perhaps may be puzzling to pundits is, whether the fact that South Africa will be hosting the 2010 World Cup may have  had any influence if at all, for the service provider to venture into this market especially after many African Bloggers had previously campaigned for the entry of the service to Africa but to no avail.Efforts at the same were met with excuses of procedural and technical difficulties .

See the following posts:

1.  David Oluinyi Ajao's post of date : 29/09/2007  wherein he stated Paypal's response as to why Africans could only send but not be able to receive payments was that

"PayPal is constantly working to expand and improve our services for our customers. We hope to be expanding our availability to include more countries, however, due to the complexities of global expansion, we cannot give a timetable for this....

2.  My First initial post on the issue which was later highlighted at the World Bank Blog  , one of the solutions propounded was for Africans to get an African solution for effective online payments .However the issue would be foolhardy since a majority of western merchants preferred PayPal as the medium of payment thus disadvantaging Africans.

How that  has changed in the case of South Africa and in the current context proves to be an enigma of sorts.However ,still it is a positive step though meager at best for the African market. A South African blogger at Imod.co.za indicates that despite the positive development still the South African user of PayPal may not be able to fully enjoy the full benefits of the service.